Mountains are aspiring to new cultural heights. Joe Simpson's extraordinary tale of survival, Touching the Void, has just been made into a movie; later this month David Grieg's new play about mountaineering, 8,000m, premieres at Glasgow's Tramway. Perhaps living in a world where the elimination of risk has become the norm has made us all secretly yearn to take a leap into thin air.
Thin air, as Jane Arnfield informs us in her one-woman show, a collaboration between Northern Stage and Quarantine, kills off your brain cells. At 24,000ft, the point where the rib of rock known as the Geneva Spur starts below the summit of Everest, a climber is taking in 70% less oxygen than somebody at sea level. Lack of oxygen can cause light-headedness, hallucinations, disorientation and euphoria. Pretty much like falling in love, really. Then, just when you think you have your feet firmly on the ground, along comes some kind of avalanche that knocks you sideways...
In Geneva the air is thick with metaphors, and the stage is thick with light bulbs. You quickly start wishing for a little more theatrical oxygen in this intensely personal piece that has Arnfield picking through the treacherous terrain of childhood memory and her own emotional history. The lecture format of the first 20 minutes means that she lays out her stall too completely; what follows is mere illustration. Her observations on mountaineering are frequently platitudinous or reliant on others' experience.
There are odd moments of real power, and the design, with its icy dazzle of light bulbs, captures all the beautiful desolation of steep places. Even so, the metaphors about connections between mountaineering, our emotional lives and risk-taking seem somewhat absurd at the moment when we finally glimpse Arnfield hanging in thin air. Guess what? She is all trussed up in a safety harness.
· Until January 17. Box office: 0191-230 5151.
